


The things that was which I 'ave seen

by hellabaloo



Category: The Pacific - Fandom
Genre: Acclimating to Civilian Life, Friendship, Gen, Post-World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-01 21:27:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2788334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellabaloo/pseuds/hellabaloo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gene and Sid went to war and came back to home to Mobile—just not together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The things that was which I 'ave seen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [marycontraire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marycontraire/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!
> 
> And thanks to missmollyetc for the beta :)

Gene gets off the train and ambles up the platform, not looking like he’s expecting anyone to be meeting him, but glancing around all the same. Sid knows the moment Gene sees his one-man welcome party and his face splits into that half-cocked grin Sid is intimately familiar with. Only Eugene would think he could slip back into town unnoticed. 

He looks less out of place to Sid in Mobile than he did in a pair of fresh dungarees, squinting against the sun on Pavuvu. Sid never had the time to get used to seeing Gene like that; he was gone before the First shipped out for Peleliu. 

“You gonna take this from me or what?” Gene asks as he launches his pack none-too-gently at Sid, who grunts at the impact.

They share a smile and this is what Sid was missing; if he didn’t quite trust being home before, well and truly finished with the war, Gene’s presence makes it that little bit more believable.

“It’s good to see you, Eugene,” Sid says, clasping his friend’s shoulder. And ain’t that the long and the short of it.

It’s easy for Sid to ask Gene to be his best man. The hollering and car horn honking is a bit much, even if it is gratifying to hear Gene laugh like that. Like the rest of the country, Sid followed the progress of island-hopping in the Pacific Theater. But after Guadalcanal, Sid also knows what they show the homefront isn’t anything close to what it’s like for the grunts actually doing the fighting. What they had shown of Peleliu and Okinawa didn’t paint a pretty picture.

Sid slows the car as he pulls into the Sledge’s drive, and Gene’s shoulders stiffen. He fiddles with his pipe.

“Right here’s fine, Sid,” he says quietly.

“You sure this is good?” Sid looks over at Gene and waits for an answer. Gene’s looking at the house he grew up in and Sid can’t puzzle out what’s going through that head of his, but Sid won’t push. Not on this. 

“Yep,” Gene drawls casually. He seems to steel himself, putting his pipe in his mouth. The silence is uncomfortable, but Sid knows the silence isn’t between them. Gene gathers his pack from the backseat and pauses, leaning on the car door.

“See you later?” 

Sid smiles at the unnecessary question. But it’s the sort of question you don’t ask while in the service.

“Welcome home, Eugene.” 

It’s stupid and trite and Sid hated hearing it himself when he first got back. It’s still the only thing worth saying.

 

[]

 

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Sid can hear Gene shout before he throws open his front door. “Hey, Sid, just gimme a minute. Father said his clubs were in the closet, but they’re not,” Gene says distractedly. “I’m gonna check the garage next.”

“Well, get a move on, tee times at the Country Club of Mobile wait for no man,” Sid says to Gene’s retreating back. He just gets a wave in response before Gene ducks out of sight. 

Sid wanders around the front hall before making his way into the sitting room, aimlessly tossing his cap in his hands. He checks his watch, and even though he gave Gene grief, they’ve got plenty of time.

There’s an opened letter addressed to Gene lying on a side table. If it weren’t, Sid wouldn’t pry, but it is, and he can see the corner of a snapshot peeking out from under the envelope. It’s wedding picture of a Marine in dress blues and a woman with dark hair. They’re both smiling.

Sid only has enough time to make out the letter’s salutation—Dear Sledgehammer—before Gene is tromping back from the garage, his father’s golf clubs slung over his shoulder.

“Buddy of yours?” Sid asks, showing Gene the picture.

Gene lights up, a wide grin stretching across his face, and sets the clubs down. He reaches for the picture and his smile softens. “Yeah. That’s Burgie, my squad leader. Kept our heads on straight, that’s for sure.”

Pointing the woman, he says, “And that’s Florence. They were stepping out together in Melbourne and Burgie cabled a proposal soon as we got off the boat in Hawaii from Peiping. Had to wait till he made it home to Texas before he got a response, though.”

Sid is aware that Gene made friends in the service, had war buddies who gave him a nickname like Sledgehammer—Sid sometimes was Johnny Reb because he was from Alabama, and more often than not he was just Phillips—but he isn’t normally faced with the evidence. He isn’t jealous, he and Gene are still the friends they were before the war and Sid has his own war buddies, but they’ve got a tacit understanding that they just don’t talk about the war. 

Gene tucks the snapshot and letter back into the envelope. He slings his father’s golf clubs over his shoulder and says, slyly, “Now, I hope you’ve already told the future Mrs. Sidney Phillips about the girl _you_ had in Melbourne.”

Sid rises to the bait, because this how their friendship works. 

He never does bring up Eugene’s nickname; he’s not sure Gene would tell him even if he did. It’s not the sort of thing that you explain to someone who wasn’t there. 

 

[]

 

Sid is out to lunch with Mary and Mrs. Houston a week before the wedding to go over the last-minute arrangements. When he was freshly back from war, the pristine starched table linens and ridiculous and specific number of forks laid out for a single place setting were completely surreal. Sid was constantly reminding himself that all these trappings used to be familiar to him.

His future mother-in-law has a seating chart and a proposed schedule that is more like a battle plan than a wedding plan, and Sid is lost in a terrifying thought of Mrs. Houston in charge of a squad of Marines when he hears her say, “Now, Sidney. You and Eugene will both be in your dress uniforms. You will ask Mr. Brown to wear a blue suit as well? I wouldn’t want the groomsmen to look out of place next to one another.”

Sid set his fork down and says, “Actually, Mrs. Houston, Gene’s said he won’t be wearing his uniform. But I’ll be sure to tell—”

“Whyever not?” Mrs. Houston asks, looking comically confused.

“Gene didn’t tell me why, ma’am, just that he wouldn’t be wearing his uniform,” Sid said. 

Gene has, in fact, told him no such thing. Sid had heard it from his brother Edward when Sid had business at the bank, and got an earful about his best friend’s lack of sense and decree to never wear the uniform again, rather than any useful information about mortgages. But if being friends with Eugene Sledge had taught Sid anything about the man, it was that he wouldn’t soon change his mind about it. 

Mary, sweet, perfect Mary distracts her mother with a strategically timed question about the wedding dress, and Sid smiles at her gratefully. From her look, he knows they will discuss it later; Mary is fond of Gene and prone to worrying. Not that Sid will have any more answers for her than he does for her mother.

He can’t tell her anything, when Gene has said nothing to Sid about the matter himself.

 

[]

 

Gene is standing up with Sid at the altar, watching Mary come down the aisle like a vision. He’s there, shoulder-to-shoulder with Sid, just where Sid asked him to be and for that day nothing else matters.

 

[]

 

Sid sees Gene desert his wallflower post and sneak out a side door so he follows, only meaning to distract his friend with a glass of spiked punch. But Gene is determined to shatter the carefully-constructed picture Sid’s been building around himself since he stepped off the train with his discharge papers and back-pay in his pocket that everything’s just fine as can be. 

“How did all this happen?” he asks, and Sid doesn’t have an answer. “I mean, look at us, Sid. Sitting here at a dance, drinking punch, not a scratch on either of us. I mean, what the hell are we doing here?” 

Sid hasn’t ever seen Gene angry like this, and he doesn’t quite know what to do. 

“And why—” Gene’s voice cracks, before he continues more forcefully, “why did I end up back here when all those other fellas didn’t?”

It’s the sixty-four-thousand dollar question, but Sid doesn’t have the answer. He’s never been good with words and, even more when Gene asked him all that time ago what was combat like, he’s not sure he can put words into any sort of order that will mean anything.

“I thought that. Every guy back has thought that,” he starts. 

Sid hasn’t, not once. He’s been too busy convincing himself being home wasn’t just a malaria-induced fever dream, but he knows it’s what Gene needs to hear. 

“But you just gotta pull yourself out of bed in the morning and get on with the day. You do that enough times in a row, you forget some things,” Sid says. And that he does believe; it’s the only thing that’s come close to working for him. “For a while, anyway.”

They lapse into silence, because what else is there to say? Especially here and now, in the pleasant warmth of a spring evening in Mobile and surrounded by paper lanterns and party-goers. Sid might almost think the war had never happened. If this were Hoosier or Leckie, Sid might feel less out of his depth. He can’t say, “Remember when?” and make Gene see that anything is better than Cape Gloucester, because they were never shoulder-to-shoulder in the muck, the heat of the jungle, the rain, any of it. They _can’t_ share this. 

Mary interrupts them, and if Sid didn’t know better, he’d think she timed it. Neither of them want to drag her into whatever this is, so Sid puts on a rueful smile and makes the expected offer to find Gene a dance partner, like him being incapable, rather than unwilling, is really the problem here.

There’s more left unsaid in Gene’s refusal than Sid can decipher, but he knows there are things neither of them say to each other. Sid just hopes Gene is incapable, rather than unwilling, of voicing his thoughts.

 

[]

 

Years later, Sid will come home from work and walk in on Gene playing tinker toys with his son, carefully fitting sticks into spools to make a simple car-like shape. His son giggles as Gene makes silly engine sounds and drives the car up his leg.

“Hey, Uncle Gene?” he asks, suddenly serious only the way a child can be.

“What’s up, buddy?” Gene is always patient with kids.

“You and Pop. You were in the war together, right?”

Sid sees Gene’s hands tremble for a moment before he reaches for the pipe and stash of tobacco ever-present in a nearby pocket. 

“Well, we both fought in the war,” he says, packing his pipe. “But not together.”

Sid is about to sweep into the room and distract his son from whatever fool notion he’s gotten into his head, when he sees Gene smile gently around the stem of his pipe.

“We weren’t together, but I wish we had been.”

“Huh. Okay,” his son says, apparently satisfied with that answer as he turns his attention back to his toys.

Sid is satisfied too. Whenever he and Gene get close to talking about the war, they skirt around the topic. They shared so much growing up together, but not this. Gene’s war—Peleliu, Okinawa—is not Sid’s war—Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester. He tries not to dwell on the war, but he agrees with his friend. That hell might have been a little easier to bear together. 

He tiptoes back to close the front door noisily and announce he’s home. Gene’s still smiling when Sid joins them on the floor.

 

[]

 

They’re old men, being honored for their service by the Mobile City Council, listening to some local politician drone on about courage and a war he wasn’t alive to remember, when Sid turns to Gene says, “The things we haven’t said about the war could fill a book.”

Gene just smiles like he has a secret.

 

[]

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. I fudged the timeline a little, and made Burgie and Florence’s wedding before Sidney and Mary’s. Let’s all handwave the time it would take to get from Australia to Texas given transportation in the 1940s together.
> 
>  
> 
> 2\. Peiping is how Beijing was romanized at the time. Sledge’s battalion was stationed there following the war. 
> 
>  
> 
> 3\. Title from the poem [For to Admire](http://www.bartleby.com/364/243.html) by Rudyard Kipling, published in _[Barrack Room Ballads](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2819/2819-h/2819-h.htm)_
> 
>  
> 
> The things that was which I ‘ave seen,  
> In barrack camp, an’ action too,  
> I tells them over by myself,  
> An’ sometimes wonders if they’re true;  
> For they was odd—most awful odd—  
> But all the same now they are o’er,  
> There must be ‘eaps o’ plenty such,  
> An’ if I wait I’ll see some more.


End file.
